The outbreak of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic has made online office and online learning just needed, and video conferencing software has become a dark horse

[Market Watch] Run all the way, video conferencing software "out of the circle"

On March 31, a news about the "United Nations chose Tencent meeting" attracted a lot of attention.

On the same day, the United Nations headquarters in New York announced that Tencent has become its global partner, providing comprehensive technical solutions for the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations, and will organize thousands of conference events online through Tencent meetings, WeChat and Tencent simultaneous interpretation. "This is a new and innovative global cooperation." The official news released by the United Nations said.

The application Tencent meeting officially released on December 25, 2019 is still a "newborn" in less than a hundred days. Everything seems to be going too smoothly. The data shows that currently the number of daily active accounts has exceeded 10 million, and the international version of Tencent Conference has been launched in more than 100 countries and regions.

It might not be appropriate to describe the Tencent meeting as "time to live", but it did catch up with the surge in market demand. Over the past two months or so, the outbreak of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic has made online office and online learning just needed. Video conferencing software has become the dark horse killed in the epidemic, while Tencent conference is one of the top runners.

In office applications, Ali's nail is "old qualification", followed by Tencent's corporate WeChat, byte-beating flying books, Huawei's WeLink and Tencent meetings are novices.

Some insiders analyzed that as a pure video conferencing software, the simple interface and simple operation may be the key to Tencent's breakthrough-as long as a connected mobile phone, the threshold for participation is greatly reduced. In the past, video conferences often required debugging of complex equipment, and higher requirements for the conference environment, radio, and network.

"Tencent uses to C (consumer) thinking to do to B (enterprise) application." In this remark.

However, in addition to expanding from video conferencing to cloud signing and online product release, the application of Tencent conferencing is not satisfied with the scope of "B"-in the days of being at home because of the epidemic, some people have used it to realize the "between friends" "Cloud dinner", someone used it to experience the "cloud party" between relatives. This simple enough application that was free during the epidemic has inspired many ideas for users.

If you want to foresee the future of this software, you can take a peek at Zoom, the originator of video conferencing. Over the past two years, this global cloud video communications industry leader has grown revenues of more than 100%. A year ago, Zoom was listed on the Nasdaq, and the company's stock price closed up 72.22% that day, with a market value of up to $ 15.9 billion.

Under the demonstration effect, companies smelling business opportunities began to follow up. In 2019, the day after the launch of the Tencent conference, Huawei WeLink was also officially released. This should not be regarded as a simple coincidence, but it can be regarded as "the hero sees the same."

Reality is indeed developing in the direction people foresee. The fourth quarter of 2019 and the annual performance report released by Tencent Holdings on March 18th have begun to show signs-although online games are still Tencent's largest performance contributor, the proportion of revenue has been almost the same as that of fintech and corporate services. .

The "out of the circle" of the Tencent meeting is also a footnote for an Internet company's strategic transformation and evolution. In September 2018, Ma Huateng, Chairman and CEO of Tencent, announced the launch of a new round of overall strategic upgrade on the 20th anniversary of Tencent: "In the first half of the Internet, Tencent provides users with quality services through connections. In the second half, we On this basis, it will help the industry and consumers to form a more open new connection ecology. "

A company's strategic choices more or less reveal the trends of its industry. The next growth point that Tencent is exploring may also be the next outlet in the Internet industry. The research institute Frost & Sullivan report shows that as of the end of 2018, the global video conference terminal industry was 1.75 billion US dollars, and the total market is expected to reach 13.82 billion US dollars in 2022.

Right now, there is still a distance between acquiring more users and realizing it, and there may be differences between the special needs caused by the epidemic and the daily needs during the post-epidemic period. But it is undeniable that the epidemic further stimulated the enthusiasm of enterprises and individuals for online office learning and even socializing. With the comprehensive development of new infrastructure such as cloud computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence, cloud services, including video conferencing, will undoubtedly usher in a broader development space.

As Jiang Qiping, director of the Information Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said, this kind of thing happened repeatedly during the technological revolution. Some future long-term trend changes will often be activated in advance by some sudden short-term opportunities.

Before the epidemic, the proportion of Chinese companies choosing online office was not high. Some people say that the new crown epidemic has caused the development of online office to be advanced by 5 years. Once you have experience in this area, and taste the sweetness of reducing office costs and improving office efficiency, it is likely to form a trend, or even evolve into a just need, as if it was born in SARS 17 years ago. Like Taobao, it has now become a part of many people's lives.

Jiang Han